The Bromantic Comedy Finally Grows Up

Coming of age, as it were, in the first decade of the new millennium, the bromantic comedy announced itself as the Hollywood genre most concerned with the state of the new American man. Films like Wedding Crashers, I Love You, Man, and Superbad gave audiences a crash course in a masculinity in crisis. With its focus on male friendships, and openly making a case for emotional intelligence as an integral part of masculine intimacy, these films spoke against rigidly held gender norms that had ossified within their generic predecessor: the romantic comedy.

While the Apatovian brand of bromantic comedy has long lost its novelty, 2016 has offered one unlikely heir to its tradition. Reclaiming the stalker-loner figure within a kooky, whimsical farting corpse flick, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Swiss Army Man may very well be the limit case of the bromantic comedy. Here is, after all a film that quite literally overlays its hetero romantic subplot onto its story of a budding male friendship. With boner and fart jokes to spare, of course.

While the Apatovian brand of bromantic comedy has long lost its novelty, 2016 has offered one unlikely heir to its tradition.

As a celebration of same-sex relationships—though obviously never ones that got sexual in any way—the bromance in the mid-2000s became, as Timothy Shary argues in Millennial Masculinity, a way to recast the American male as seemingly less heteromasculinist than it is in our cultural imaginary. The men in those films were gentle (though raunchy), sensitive (though crass), and openly refused to conform to that most vague of all imperatives—"to be a real man."

A24 Films

The films that enshrined this new American male were also characterized by an undercurrent of homoeroticism that existed alongside its comedic use of gay panic. Superbad, for example, finds Seth (Jonah Hill) drawing dicks as a hilarious pastime, while Wedding Crashers sees Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) needing to rebuff a gay man's advances while tied up to a bed. Framed as comedy, these moments expressed masculine anxieties about homosexuality while at the same time neutering them. They were a "No Homo" punch line that was all the funnier for its self-awareness.

But what was once a coy wink has become a full-blown smoldering smirk. The 2016 summer comedies have reminded us that the male-only spaces celebrated by the bromantic comedy are not only littered with gay subtext; they all but require it. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, for example, in a character reveal that exemplifies this very shift "turned" Dave Franco's straight frat guy—yes, the one who took pride in his ability to achieve a voluntary erection—gay. That his sexuality is celebrated (by audiences and characters alike) shows us that acceptance of homosexuality is a key aspect of the contemporary American bro—at least according to the movies. Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! went one further. Shooting its beautiful jocks with a lustful gaze that made them walking gay porn parodies (which led Kyle Buchanan to dub the film "one of the gayest movies of the year"), Linklater all but scrubbed the jock bro figure of the toxic masculinity it has come to embody.

These twinned developments: an optimistic and positive celebration of male-only spaces (the frat house, the locker room), paired with an inclusive vision of homosexuality, are at the heart of Swiss Army Man. As Paul Dano's Hank is about to hang himself, he spots a corpse washing ashore. Manny (played by Daniel Radcliffe) becomes Hank's unlikely ally, helping him escape the island where he'd been stranded. Think of him as a sentient and conveniently versatile Wilson from Cast Away. And as Hank learns of Manny's many uses—his erect penis is a compass, his teeth work as a razor—he teaches this increasingly chatty corpse about his life and the unrequited love he feels for a girl whose picture graces his phone screen. In telling Manny about this girl, Hank goes about dreaming up a relationship with her, recreating scenes of courtship with the help of his trusted corpse friend. The hetero romance of the film gets overlaid on top of this budding male friendship, giving their relationship a decidedly queer bent—like when Dano sports a wig and a makeshift dress to go on a "date" with Manny-as-Hank. Their desire for one another (triangulated yes, by the girl Hank has creepily stalked previously) even culminates in a kiss between the two guys.

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The connection that Hank and Manny make grows stronger as they fight their way through the wilderness (how manly!) while crafting an impossibly quirky environment around them (Hank turns trash into a Michel Gondry-esque backdrop for his fantasies). When the film eventually has Hank face the reality he'd left behind, we're forced to see how creepy, if not outright dangerous, this loner kid could be—if not to others, then at the very least to himself. But we're left instead heartened by the relationship that Hank developed with Manny. The queer relationship at the center of Swiss Army Man helps bolster the argument that what we are witnessing is, in fact, an enlightened vision of masculinity, one unbeholden to retrograde sexist or homophobic ideas. Perhaps, indifferent to them altogether.

The queer relationship at the center of 'Swiss Army Man' helps bolster the argument that what we are witnessing is, in fact, an enlightened vision of masculinity

But in fact, the twee queerness of the film helps mask the more unsettling aspects of Hank's personality, making audiences chuckle at the intimacy championed by the film and to root for the burgeoning bromance there represented at the expense of its broader implications. Manny ultimately teaches Hank that all he wants—nay, needs—is a safe space where he can fart without shame and where he can recast a creepy stalker-like relationship with a girl he's never met as an adorable meet-cute in the company of his bud.

There's a transgressive move embedded in these contemporary takes on male friendships. Contemporary takes on the bromantic comedy offer refreshingly progressive models of young men. They feel like open rebukes to the headlines and stories that have made "toxic masculinity" start to feel like a tautology. Within this context Swiss Army Man is the bromantic comedy taken to its absurdist (and most absurd) extreme, critiquing and sanitizing the white American straight male while being, in bro parlance, supergay.

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